Submitted to Legal and Criminological Psychology

Four forms of ‘offender’ rehabilitation:

Towards an interdisciplinary perspective

Fergus McNeill, University of Glasgow

Address:

Fergus McNeill

Professor of Criminology & Social Work

Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research

University of Glasgow

Ivy Lodge

63 Gibson Street

Glasgow G12 8LR

UK

Email: Fergus.McNeill@glasgow.ac.uk

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Abstract

This paper aims to advance the case for a more fully interdisciplinary understanding of
offender rehabilitation, partly as a means of shedding light upon and moving beyond
contemporary ‘paradigm conflicts’. It begins with a review of current arguments about
what a credible ‘offender’ rehabilitation theory requires and by exploring some aspects
of current debates about different theories. It goes on to locate this specific kind of
contemporary theory-building in the context of historical arguments about and
critiques of rehabilitation as a concept and in practice. In the third part of the paper, I
explore the nature of the relationship between desistance theories and rehabilitation
theories, so as to develop my concluding argument; i.e. that debates about psychological
rehabilitation have been hampered by a failure to engage fully with debates about at
least three other forms of rehabilitation (legal, moral and social) that emerge as being
equally important in the process of desistance from crime.

Keywords

Rehabilitation, RNR, Desistance, Sentencing, Corrections

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Introduction

I embark on writing this particular paper for this particular journal with a degree
of trepidation. Firstly, I am not a psychologist and am naturally hesitant about
contributing a paper to a distinguished psychological journal, which might be read as a
critique of a disciplinary perspective that I understand only partially but which I respect
and admire. Secondly, I am wary of being seen as issuing another salvo in a
contemporary conflict between competing models of rehabilitation, variously cast as
between the Risks-Needs-Responsivity model and the Good Lives Model model (see
Andrews, Bonta and Wormith, 2011; Ward, Yates and Willis, forthcoming), or between
‘risk-based’ and ‘strengths-based’ approaches (Maruna and LeBel, 2003, 2009), or
between ‘what works?’ and ‘desistance-based’ corrections (Farrall, 2002; McNeill,
2006). Though a great deal has been learned from these recent debates, both about the
similarities and intersections between these various models and perspectives and about
their genuine points of contention, I want to suggest instead that it is time to take a step
back to questions that relate to the foundations of rehabilitation itself.

My central argument is that rehabilitation’s ‘paradigm conflicts’ arise in part

from and are perpetuated by an inadequately articulated conception of what we mean
by ‘offender rehabilitation’ itself. In essence, I argue that a psychological understanding
of rehabilitation provides a necessary but insufficient basis for correctional or forensic
psychology, and for anyone involved in the fields of sentencing and corrections. Both
the concept and the project of rehabilitation compel and require the development of a
more fully interdisciplinary perspective; one that combines insights from (at least)
criminology, history, philosophy and the sociology of law and punishment, as well as
from the more obviously related ‘psy’ disciplines of psychology, psychiatry and social
work.

Paradigm conflicts and rehabilitation theories

This paper is of a somewhat different type from its companion paper in this issue
by Devon Polaschek. Nonetheless, Polaschek’s excellent paper provides an obvious
place to begin since her balanced and sympathetic critical analysis of the Risks-Needs-
Responsivity model (Andrews and Bonta, 2010 – RNR) directly or indirectly raises
many of the issues that I want to develop here. Her account of what types of theory-
building are involved or implied in the development of RNR is particularly important.
Polaschek points out that the adequacy of a theory should be evaluated at the
explanatory level at which it is pitched, although we might add the caveat that this
should also compel the theory’s proponents not to make claims or offer prescriptions
that relate to other levels or types of analysis or theory-building. Drawing on work by

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Ward and Hudson (1998), Polaschek argues that RNR should be understood and
assessed as a Level I theory; that is, one which is:

global and multifactorial, necessarily broad in focus and lacking sufficient detail
to directly shape the design of specific interventions. They are hybrids (Ward et
al., 2007): informed partly by etiological theories, but also incorporating the
underlying values and assumptions of intervention, therapy strategies, change
processes, programme context and setting, and implementation, all in an
abstract, “high level” way. Their purpose is to provide general parameters in
which rehabilitative endeavours will operate, and the support developments on
the other two levels1’ (Polaschek, this issue, p10).

Ward and Maruna (2007) draw on similar sources to suggest that a ‘good’
offender rehabilitation theory needs to combine three elements; a clear and explicit
account of (1) the general principles underlying rehabilitation (metaphysical,
epistemological, ethical and normative); of (2) its etiological assumptions (which by
explaining the ‘causes’ of the offending behaviour guide understanding of ‘treatment
goals’); and of (3) the intervention implications (the ‘how to’ element that guides
effective interventions).

Drawing on a close reading of the latest articulations of the RNR theory (or
family of theories), Polaschek prefaces her analysis of its strengths, weaknesses and
implementation problems by noting its ‘overarching principles’. RNR is a theory based
on respect for persons and for the normative context of rehabilitation; it is based on
empirically validated psychological theory; and it asserts the importance and legitimacy
of services that prevent crime, even outside the justice system. But, in terms of the
relationships between these three overarching principles, and crucially for my
purposes, she notes that:

‘Although values other than empirical standing are important in evaluating

theory quality (see Ward, et al., 2006), empirical validity and practical
application have primacy when evaluating intervention theories... their main
purpose is application, rather than knowledge generation for its own sake (p12-
13)’.

These are key points to which I will return, but first it may be helpful to briefly
summarise Polaschek’s appraisal of RNR. In terms of its considerable strengths, she
suggests that RNR has strong unifying power, external consistency and explanatory
depth. In other words, it explains well why certain kinds of rehabilitative programmes
work better than others, and why certain skills and practices are empirically associated
with better outcomes. It also addresses a major weaknesses in ‘social-level etiological
1
These ‘other two levels’ include Level II theories which deal with a single etiological factor and Level III theories
which are local theories of the offence process itself.

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theories’; that is, their tendency to over-predict crime amongst those subject to social
disadvantage and their failure to explain why some similarly socially situated
individuals offend when others do not. RNR has also been subject to considerable
empirical validation through evaluation research; its core principles have been refined
by such evidence but never falsified. Moreover, it has proved to be a fertile theory in
terms of generating numerous practical applications. Overall, it has made an ‘original
substantive contribution to the development of criminal justice assessment,
intervention, research, programme accreditation and programme integrity’ around the
world (Polaschek, this issue, p15, emphasis in original). For the sake of clarity, let me
make clear that I agree with that assessment.

But Polaschek also provides some thoughtful critique of RNR and notes several
problems in its ‘translation’ into practice. For example, despite its merits, there are
important limits in RNR’s explanatory depth; specifically, she argues that the
responsivity principle, despite its centrality to the model both in terms of its humanity
and its effectiveness, is under-articulated and theoretically unsophisticated – a ‘catch-all
category’. One might add here that, whereas other aspects of RNR have become more
elaborated and sophisticated with the passage of time, the responsivity principle has, at
least in its implementation, become more vulnerable to over-simplification and
misinterpretation (Robinson and Crow, 2009)2. Thus, whereas Andrews, et al., (1990:
20) initially defined responsivity in terms of the individualised matching of ‘[s]tyles and
modes of service... to the learning styles and abilities of offenders’, the later distinction
between individual and general responsivity (see, for example, Bonta and Andrews,
2011), and the subsequent over-emphasis on the latter, has too often allowed a complex
and important principle to be reduced to the generalised injunction: ‘Employ social
learning and cognitive behavioural strategies’ (Bonta and Andrews, 2011: 21).

In contradistinction, as Polaschek suggests, one of the benefits of strengths-

based approaches has been their deeper engagement with individual motivations and
their recognition of the importance of giving people (positive) ‘reasons to want to
engage in desistance and change (e.g. Porporino, 2010: Ward and Maruna, 2007), not
just the capacities to do so’ (p16). RNR also suffers from a ‘conceptual gap’ that exists
between the main targets for change (that is, the ‘central eight’ risk factors) and the
theoretical resources that are necessary to translate them into intervention (design,
formulation, planning and monitoring). Moreover, drawing on the recent work of Mann,
Hanson and Thornton (2010), Polaschek describes the ‘central eight’ themselves as
proxies or placeholders for a series of more complex phenomena. A broad list of factors,
she argues (following Ward and Maruna, 2007), is no substitute for a full understanding
of the mechanisms behind offending, of the interrelationships between risk factors and
of how change processes affect these interrelationships so as to moderate risk (though

2
I am indebted to Gwen Robinson for first making this point to me.

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she suggests that such work is more appropriately a task for level II or level III
theories).

With respect to the translation of RNR into practice, Polaschek is equally

perceptive. She notes that the model is hard to comprehend and hard to communicate
effectively, partly because of the use of complex technical language. Perhaps more
importantly (though the problems are connected), she recognises some of the potential
and actual mistranslations of RNR into the field that have unfairly affected the theory’s
standing. Thus some programmes in the RNR tradition have been accused of being
focused solely on risk reduction (and thus the putative public good), while ignoring the
legitimate (approach) goals and aspirations of offenders; as such they have failed to
engage offenders and build the types of therapeutic alliance that positive change
requires. They have focused on criminogenic needs to the exclusion of other needs that
nonetheless require assistance and without which work on criminogenic needs may
stall or never get started. They have worked to develop the capacities and skills of
offenders without attending sufficiently to their motivations and their social
opportunities (see McNeill and Whyte, 2007; McNeill, 2009). However, Polaschek,
unlike less careful critics (including me, in some of my previous work, e.g. McNeill,
2001; 2004), is careful to distinguish between what RNR theory intends and how it has
come to be applied in particular contexts for particular reasons.
Thus, while none of the criticisms mentioned in the last paragraph can be
straightforwardly directed at RNR theory itself, they all have considerable bite when
applied to examinations of its operationalization in some contexts (for a compelling and
authoritative account of the largest scale attempt to operationalize RNR -- in England
and Wales -- see Raynor and Robinson, 2009, and more generally Porporino, 2010). In
such examinations, evidence of very significant problems has emerged; principal among
these is perhaps the over-reliance on one style of intervention (‘structured, cognitive
behavioural, closed-groups based treatment programming’), and with it the use of
overly-scripted, manualised, homogenized approaches, which themselves seemed to
neglect the very concept of individual responsivity itself. While it is true that more
recent developments in programme design and delivery (for example, the increasing
use of ‘rolling programmes’ that allow offenders to pursue more individualised
programmes even within groups, thus still allowing for peer support and challenge)
have worked much harder to engage offenders and to accommodate diversity, beyond
these technical ‘implementation’ problems lies a deeper malaise to which Polaschek
refers in her conclusion: ‘the more significant problems remain in actually
implementing programmes in [the] unforgiving settings’ (Polaschek, this issue, p26)
that contemporary criminal justice systems all too often provide.

Though we will return to some of these specific arguments below, in the next
section I want to connect one of Polaschek’s first insights – the relative priority of
empirical evidence as opposed to values-based arguments in building rehabilitation
theory – with one of her last – the unforgiving nature of contemporary corrections. To

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do so, however, requires a brief detour into the history of rehabilitation theory and
practice.

Revisiting rehabilitation’s history

It is, in one sense, hardly surprising that rehabilitation theories remain the
subject of controversy; the concept of rehabilitation has always been both remarkably
elastic and hotly contested. Bottoms (1980) has pointed out that whereas rehabilitation,
at least on a Foucauldian reading, has sometimes been represented as being a project of
‘coercive soul-transformation’ (or better as being too readily corralled into such a
project), a different meaning of the term had been identified in the work of the 18th
century Classicists (e.g. Beccaria 1764/1963) who argued for the use of punishment as a
way of ‘requalifying individuals as… juridical subjects’ (Foucault 1975/1977: 130).
Though correctional psychologists might take issue with Foucault’s reading of the ways
in which they have exercised their professional power, the very term ‘correctional’
speaks to an essentially utilitarian conception of rehabilitation. This is a form of
rehabilitation in which the ultimate aim is to change the offender so as to reduce harm
(at least) and contribute to the public good, including the offender’s best interests (at
best). Beccaria clearly has in mind a different aim: the full restoration of the formerly
errant citizen so that s/he can once again enjoy all of his/her rights and fulfil all of
his/her responsibilities. The central distinction here is that Beccaria’s notion of
‘requalification’ is not based principally on maximising social utility or welfare but on
restoring duties and rights – hence, it is a more deontological conception of
rehabilitation. I will return briefly to this important but quite different notion of
rehabilitation as requalification in the final section of this paper.
The broadly correctional or utilitarian form of rehabilitation has, however, been
expressed in very different ways. Two decades ago, Edgardo Rotman (1990) in a
brilliant and brief introductory chapter to his book ‘Beyond Punishment’, summarised
the history of rehabilitation as being represented in four successive models. For
Rotman, the story begins with the rise of the penitentiary, as a place of confinement
where the sinner is given the opportunity to reflect soberly on their behaviour, and on
how to reform themselves, perhaps with divine help. This ideal stressed the reformative
potential of both contemplation and work, sometimes in combination. But the religious
ideas of rehabilitation expressed in the penitentiary evolved rapidly in the 19th and
early 20th centuries with the emergence of the ‘psy’ disciplines. The idea that
rehabilitation was about reforming the sinner, bringing them to acknowledgement of
their sins, invoking repentance and requiring some penance before restoration, was
progressively supplanted with a more scientific or medical model. Here, rehabilitation
was understood as a form of treatment which could correct some flaw in individuals,
whether physical or psychological, thus remedying the problem of their behaviour. In
the later half of the 20th century, this more medical or therapeutic version of
rehabilitation was itself displaced, to some extent, by a shift in emphasis towards a
model based on social learning in which behaviours were understood as learned

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responses that could be unlearned. In this context rehabilitation was recast not as a sort
of quasi-medical treatment for criminality but as the re-education of the poorly
socialised (Garland 1985, 2001).

This historical progression and reformulation of rehabilitation, of course, was

spectacularly derailed in the1970s. In this respect, an edited collection by Bottoms and
Preston (1980), ominously entitled ‘The Coming Penal Crisis’, emerges as a remarkably
prescient piece of work. In that collection, Tony Bottoms (1980), in a typically erudite
and compelling chapter that deals with the collapse of the rehabilitative ideal, summed
up its flaws and failings. First of all, rehabilitation came to be seen as being theoretically
faulty in that it misconstrued the causes of crime as individual when they were coming
to be understood as being principally social and structural, and it misconstrued the
nature of crime, failing to recognise the ways in which crime is itself socially
constructed. Secondly, rehabilitative practices had been exposed as being systematically
discriminatory, targeting coercive interventions on the most poor and disadvantaged
people in society. Third, rehabilitation was seen as being inconsistent with justice itself
because judgements about liberty had come to be unduly influenced by dubious and
subjective professional judgements hidden from or impenetrable to the offender.
Through the development of the ‘psy’ disciplines, experts emerged with the supposed
capacity to ‘diagnose’ what was wrong with the offender, and the offender was cast as a
victim of his or her lack of insight. By implication, unless and until the offender was
‘corrected’ by the expert, s/he could not be treated as a subject. Fourth, it was argued
that rehabilitation faced a fundamental moral problem rooted in its attempts to
(psychologically) coerce people to change. Finally, at the time when Bottoms was
writing, the empirical evidence seemed to suggest that, despite its scientific pretensions,
rehabilitation did not seem to work.

Powerful though it is, there are flaws in this critique. Crucially, emerging
evidence about ‘what works?’, not least evidence provided by RNR’s progenitors and
their colleagues, played a vital role in challenging the last point; thankfully, there is an
evidence base for rehabilitation. But that evidence base, in and of itself, does not
address the other four criticisms which I will label the problems of crime theory, of
rehabilitation and injustice, of dubious expertise, and of coerced correction.
Contemporary rehabilitation theories perhaps have more in common with a social
learning or social psychological than a medicalised version of correctional rehabilitation
(on the distinction, see Johnstone, 1996), although some critics discern in the concepts
and language of RNR (specifically the oft-repeated and unhelpful use of terms like
‘dosage’) an implicit medical model (e.g. Kendall, 2004). But, even if rehabilitation is not
now based on a strictly medical model, the full force of Bottoms’ (1980) four criticisms
is only partly deflected.

Taking each problem in turn, while contemporary rehabilitation’s underlying

crime theories avoid the pathologising traps of individualistic positivism, they still have

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to engage somehow with the problem that crime is (at least in part) a social construct.
We do not choose to pursue all interpersonal or social harms through criminalisation;
the explanandum of crime theories is itself socially conditioned. That single insight has
profound consequences. It affects and infuses the normative contexts of rehabilitative
work (including raising difficult questions about who and what gets selected for penal
‘correction’ and who and what does not) and it creates a series of complex
methodological quandaries. Not least amongst these is the fact that our dependent
variable of choice for evaluating rehabilitative strategies – reconviction – is revealed as
being deeply and irrevocably flawed. It is not a straightforward measure of behaviour
change (far less of positive shifts in identity); it is a measure of a series of interlocking
social reactions to perceptions of behaviour (witnessing, reporting, detecting,
prosecuting, sentencing, conviction)3. To extend a medical analogy, judging
rehabilitative interventions by reconviction is a bit like judging the success of health
interventions by whether anyone shows up at the doctor again (for any reason, not just
in relation to the problem that has actually been treated); judging them by re-
incarceration is like judging medical treatments by re-hospitalisation (again for any
reason) after treatment. The reliance on reconviction also misses the point that even if
reconviction were a good proxy for reoffending, the ‘mere’ absence of offending does
not in and of itself signal progress towards long term or permanent desistance from
crime or, putting it another way, long-term committed compliance with the law. If we
have that longer term objective in mind, which is more significant: a minor lapse by
someone committed to but struggling with desistance, or a crime-free lull while a
committed re-offender regroups?

The other three problems also remain but for reasons of space need to be passed
over more swiftly here. The problem of rehabilitation and injustice, or of rehabilitation’s
place in or association with discriminatory justice practices, remains a challenging one,
not just because of systematic (if unintended) biases in terms of who gets selected for
‘correction’ of which sorts and who gets defined as ‘incorrigible’, but also in terms of the
extent to which rehabilitation’s resources (principally assessment tools and
interventions approaches) are sufficiently sensitive to, for example, gender differences
and cultural diversity (on which see, for example, Raynor, 2007; Robinson and Crow,
2009: Ch. 6). The problem of dubious expertise is only partly resolved by the
development of a more robust evidence base for rehabilitation. While it is true that
contemporary approaches, perhaps to varying degrees, begin to recognise the need to
treat people as active subjects in their own rehabilitation (and not simply as the passive
objects of expert intervention), there remains considerable force in critiques both of the
professional power of the ‘psy’ disciplines (e.g. Rose, 1989) and, more specifically, of the
increasing exercise of that power not in ‘treatment’ or ‘therapeutic’ decisions but in

3
As such, it violates ‘Sellin’s dictum’ which states that ‘[t]he value of criminal statistics as a basis for the
measurement of criminality in geographic areas decreases as the procedures take us farther away from the
offence itself’ (Sellin, 1931: 346). I am grateful to Elvinas Blazevicius for bringing Sellin’s dictum to my
attention.

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influencing decisions about justice itself, specifically in relation to sentencing or release-

decision making. It is in the complex and fraught interfaces between these forms of
judgement (psychological and legal) that we find the sources, for example, of
burgeoning resentment amongst English prisoners towards what apparently seems to
them to be the capricious and illegitimate exercise of ‘soft power’ by prison
psychologists (Crewe, 2009; and more generally Maruna 2011).

Of course, this is closely related to the enduring problem of coerced correction

(or ‘authoritarian’ rather than ‘anthropocentric’ rehabilitation – see Rotman, 1990); a
problem exacerbated in systems where increasing confidence in rehabilitation’s
effectiveness has coincided with the development of a ‘toughening up’ of penal policy.
One apparently minor aspect of this conjunction in England and Wales was the
withdrawal of any requirement for consent to accredited programme conditions within
community sentences. These programmes therefore involve rehabilitative treatment
without consent; a development that seems to have come to pass without much critique
from psychologists whose ethical standards it might seem to compromise.

Fortunately, Bottoms’ (1980) also provides some suggestions about how we

might best respond to these problems. Reflecting the pessimism of the times, four of his
five options imply or require a shift away from rehabilitation, at least as traditionally
conceived. However, he also argued that rehabilitation could be rescued through its
own correction; that is, by attending more carefully to questions of consent, by
committing adequate resources to make it more likely to be effective and by conducting
our rehabilitative activities in ways which are more respectful of liberty. More
specifically, we could ensure that the intrusions that rehabilitation imposes on the
offender are never greater than is merited by their offending behaviour, placing
rehabilitative requirements within the envelope of proportionality.

There is no space here to properly review the renaissance of rehabilitation in the

1980s and 1990s. However, leaving aside the better known story of the advancement of
the evidence base, it is worth recalling that there was also, in the 1980s a brief flurry of
writing about new normative or philosophical approaches to rehabilitation, including
Rotman’s (1990) work (see also Cullen and Gilbert, 1982). The ‘new rehabilitationists’
(see Lewis, 2005), much as Bottoms’ suggested, proposed four principles to guide rights
based rehabilitation: the assertion of the duty of the State to provide for rehabilitation;
the establishment of proportional limits on the intrusions opposed; the principle of
maximising choice and voluntarism in the process; and a commitment to using prison as
a measure of last resort. However, as Robinson (2008) has shown, in policy and practice
(in England and Wales at least) what emerged was not a right-based but a more
profoundly utilitarian and correctional form of rehabilitation increasingly influenced by
the preoccupation with public protection and risk reduction. Under this paradigm,
probation officers were required to intervene with or treat the offender to reduce re-
offending and to protect the public. What is critical about this paradigm was that the

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‘client’ -- the person or social group that the probation service is serving -- is not the
offender. Rather probation is trying to change offenders to protect the law-abiding (see
McCulloch and McNeill, 2007, Robinson and McNeill, 2004). Within this paradigm,
practice was rooted in professional assessment of risk and need governed by structured
assessment instruments; the offender was less and less an active participant and more
and more an object to be assessed through technologies applied by professionals and
compulsorily engaged in structured programmes and offender management processes
as required elements of legal orders imposed, as we have already noted, irrespective of
consent (McNeill, 2006).

Though this brief account of rehabilitation’s recent development may seem some
way distant from Polaschek’s discussion of RNR, in fact it speaks directly to her point
about the relative import of questions of values and of questions of evidence, and to her
point about the hostile correctional climate. Though the designers of correctional
interventions are not directly responsible for the ways in which their ideas are refracted
or distorted in the processes of transfer and implementation, anyone venturing to offer
a rehabilitation theory to the world of practice has some responsibility for thinking
critically (and sociologically) about how their ideas might be used and abused. It is
manifestly reasonable to suggest that assessing the technical merits of a rehabilitation
theory must rely primarily heavily on judgements about evidence. However, the lesson
of rehabilitation’s troubled and troubling history is surely that the real-world and often
unintended effects of correctional innovation must surely compel innovators to set
some normative limits around their rehabilitative intentions, techniques and intrusions.

Since the history of rehabilitation is littered with adverse and unintended

consequences (for offenders, victims and communities), it is essential to articulate some
normative constraints around and within rehabilitation. To meet that obligation,
rehabilitation theorists need to engage seriously with moral philosophy (which can help
explore these necessary normative principles and constraints) and with the sociology of
punishment (which can help to anticipate and expose the risks of unintended
consequences). Perhaps the recent success of the GLM in engaging and inspiring
practitioners owes something to that fact that its engagement with these questions has
been both enthusiastic and sophisticated (Ward and Birgden, 2007).

Desistance theories and rehabilitation theories

Philosophy and sociology are not the only other disciplines with which
rehabilitation theorists need to seriously engage. The brief discussion above of the
problems posed by inadequate crime theories and flawed dependent variables suggests
the need for a robust engagement with criminology too. This is, of course, already a
well-developed dialogue, though not always a mutually respectful and helpful one (for
an overview, see Hollin, 2002). But even where the dialogue has been reasonably
productive in terms of rehabilitative ‘applications’ (for example, in the relationship

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between risk assessment and developmental criminology), there remains a lot to talk
about. One of the most interesting emerging conversations concerns the relationships
between criminological evidence about the process of desistance from crime (that is,
how and why people stop offending) and the theory and practice of rehabilitation. Space
permits only a cursory engagement with this dialogue here; interested readers will find
much more developed discussions in a number of recent books and articles (for
example, Farrall, 2002; Laws and Ward, 2010; McNeill, 2006: McNeill and Whyte 2007;
McNeill, 2009; McNeil, Raynor and Trotter, 2010; Ward and Maruna, 2007; Weaver and
McNeill, 2010). Here, I will point to just some aspects of this dialogue that seem
especially pertinent to the construction of rehabilitation theories and practices.

The central question here concerns how a body of evidence about how and why
people change can and should speak to the practical challenge of helping them do so.
Put that way, the relevance of desistance research for thinking about rehabilitation
seems obvious; securing desistance is, after all, a central objective of rehabilitation. In a
sense, of course, both RNR and GLM are (the latter more explicitly than the former: see
Ward and Maruna, 2007) theories of ‘assisted desistance’; that is, they aim to explain
how we can best help people to stop offending. Crucially though, RNR’s underlying
approach is based on targeting the intervention on factors that predict criminal
behaviour, not on factors that predict desistance. While we might tend to assume that
these two sets of factors (risk factors and desistance factors) are mirror images of one
another, or are simply opposing ends of a series of continua, recent evidence suggests
that the picture is much more complex (Farrington, 2010). Explanations of why people
offend may be a key part of building rehabilitation theories, but increasingly
criminologists recognise the need for another kind of explanatory or theory concerned
with the etiology not of crime but of desistance from crime.

There are three main theoretical perspectives in desistance research, which

focus respectively on the significance of age and maturation, of life transitions and the
social bonds associated with them, and of narrative changes in personal and social
identity (Maruna, 2001). Increasingly, desistance theorists have drawn these strands
together, arguing that the process of desistance is produced in the interplay between
these three sets of factors (Farrall and Bowling, 1999; Farrall et al., 2011). One
important development in the desistance literature is concerned with seeking a clearer
account of the process of desistance, or of the different stages of the desistance process
(though ‘aspects’ might be a better word than ‘stages’, since none of the researchers
discussed below suggest a simple linear progression). Thus Giordano et al. (2002), in a
particularly important contribution, offer a theory of ‘cognitive transformation’ in which
developing ‘openness to change’ somehow meets with ‘…exposure to a particular hook
or set of hooks for change’ (p1000) and ‘one’s attitude toward [such hooks]’ (p1001).
This may in turn allow the development of a third stage in which the person begins
envisioning ‘an appealing and conventional replacement self’ (and perhaps turning

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away from a ‘feared self’, on which see Paternoster and Bushway, 2010). In somewhat
similar vein, Maruna and Farrall (2004: 27-8) explain that:

‘a lull can turn into secondary desistance when two things happen. First, the
person finds a source of agency and communion in non-criminal activities. They
find some sort of “calling” -- be it parenthood, painting, coaching, chess or what
Sennett (2003) calls “craft-love” -- through which they find meaning and purpose
outside of crime… The second part of our desistance formula, like that of
Lemert’s deviance theory, involves societal reaction. The desisting person’s
change in behavior is sometimes recognized by others and reflected back to him
in a “delabeling process”... ’ (Maruna and Farrall, 2004: 28).

In secondary desistance, it is not just that criminal behaviour stops, ‘existing

roles become disrupted’ and a ‘reorganization based upon a new role or roles will occur
(Lemert, 1951: 76)… desistance does involve identifiable and measurable changes at the
level of personal identity or the ‘me’ of the individual’ (Maruna et al., 2004: 274). It is in
secondary desistance perhaps that the person experiences or accomplishes the fourth
stage in Giordano et al.’s (2002: 1002) model: ‘a transformation in the way the actor
views the deviant behaviour or lifestyle itself’.

INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE

A recent elucidation of this process has been provided by Bottoms and Shapland
(2011), drawing on the findings of the Sheffield desistance study of male young adult
recidivists. Their model involves a seven-stage process in which current offending is
influenced by a triggering event; which leads to the wish to try to change; which leads
the offender to think differently about himself or his surroundings; which leads the
offender to take action towards desistance. However, these fledgling attempts to desist
may be threatened by obstacles, barriers and temptations, so the desister must find
reinforcing factors (from within himself or more likely within his changing social
relations) to maintain the change which, if successful, may ultimately enable with the
establishment of a crime-free identity. Crucially, progression along this journey is
affected, for better or worse, by both the ‘pre-programmed potential’ of the individual
and his ‘social capital’ resources.

Drawing on these and other studies, a body of scholarship has emerged which,
following Farrall’s injunction that practice should become ‘desistance-focused’, seeks to
interpret desistance research for practice. This work tends to stress (albeit to varying
degrees) six central themes:

1. Since desistance is an inherently individualised and subjective process,

approaches to intervention must accommodate and exploit issues of identity and
diversity. (Weaver and McNeill, 2010).

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2. The development and maintenance not just of motivation but also of hope
become key tasks for workers (Farrall and Calverley, 2006).
3. Desistance can only be understood within the context of human relationships;
not just relationships between workers and offenders (though these matter a
great deal) but also between offenders and those who matter to them (Burnett
and McNeill, 2005; McNeill, 2006).
4. Although we tend to focus on offenders’ risk and needs, they also have strengths
and resources that they can use to overcome obstacles to desistance – both
personal strengths and resources and strengths and resources in their social
networks. Supervision needs to support and develop these capacities (Maruna
and LeBel, 2003).
5. Since desistance is about discovering agency, interventions need to encourage
and respect self-determination; this means working with offenders not on them
(McCulloch, 2005; McNeill, 2006).
6. Interventions should work on ‘human capital’ (or developing offenders’
capacities and skills)(Maguire and Raynor, 2006), but also on ‘social capital’
(developing relationships and networks that generate opportunities)(Farrall,
2002, 2004; McNeill and Maruna, 2007; McNeill and Whyte, 2007).

To some extent, the findings and prescriptions of desistance research first came to
prominence in the UK as a critique of the narrow interpretations and overly
managerialized implementations of ‘what works’ discussed above (see, for example,
Farrall, 2002; McNeill, 2004, 2006). On my part at least, this was never intended as a
direct critique of RNR as a rehabilitation theory – nor of any other rehabilitation theory.
But perhaps, as an advocate of a ‘desistance paradigm’ (McNeill, 2006), I should hold
myself to the standard I proposed in the last section and elaborate both the intended
and the unintended consequences of my juxtaposition of a ‘what works’ paradigm with
a desistance paradigm.

The tensions between narrow interpretations of ‘Evidence-Based Practice’ (not least

in terms of what counts as evidence), the managerialized implementation of ‘what
works’ and a desistance perspective are indeed serious and real; the tensions between a
desistance-based perspective and RNR theory are perhaps somewhat less substantial.
They require much more discussion than I can offer here (see McNeill et al., 2010;
Porporino, 2010), but let me try to summarise some of the issues that need to be
addressed, and also suggest some of the potential synergies, with reference to the
notion of ‘Pasteur’s Quadrant’ (see figure 2, below).

INSERT FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE

‘Pasteur’s Quadrant’ is the title of a book by Donald Stokes (1997); he developed

the concept in arguing against Vannevar Bush, FDR’s science advisor, who famously
drew a firm distinction between basic research and applied research, seeing the latter

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Submitted to Legal and Criminological Psychology

as being inherently inferior. Bush argued influentially that applied research (here
represented by Thomas Edison) invariably drives our pure (here represented by the
theoretical physicist Nils Bohr). But for Stokes, Pasteur epitomised the type of
researcher whose work and impact refutes the distinction – whether in relation to the
pasteurization process, the germ theory of disease, or the biology of fermentation,
Pasteur developed entire fields of study at the same time as inventing improvements in
health and commerce.

Using this model can perhaps help to clarify the relationships between
desistance theories and rehabilitation theories. ‘Pure basic’ desistance research studies
the process for its own sake, inverting Polaschek’s priorities (discussed above); it is not
principally concerned with applications of the knowledge thus generated (but of course
this is not to say that it doesn’t have applications). Indeed, it is possible that one reason
for the muted impact of desistance research (until recently at least) is that it may have
seemed to be more directed by scientific curiosity than by the quest to solve pressing
social problems. Conversely, RNR and GLM – like most rehabilitation theories – do not
represent pure basic research, but neither are they simple products of Edisonian,
theory-less tinkering and experimenting. While they do draw on and depend on
evaluation evidence (albeit to different extents), they are better understood as
representing ‘use-inspired research’. However, the overly narrow anti-theory
implementation of RNR as the ‘what works’ (or better ‘whatever works’) approach
perhaps did come close to Edisonian ‘pure applied’ research. Though beyond the scope
of this paper, there are even more alarming dangers of privileging a purely
experimental criminology which commends and relies upon RCTs as the principal basis
for innovation and development (on which see Hough, 2010; Maruna and Barber, 2011).

What we might call the emerging body of ‘assisted desistance’ research (which
specifically intends to examine what helps people desist, and what frustrates their
efforts) also fits into Pasteur’s Quadrant. It is clearly use-inspired, but it is also driven by
pure basic research and theory-building around how and why people stop offending
(not why they start or why they persist). In other words, its findings and prescriptions
rely on analyses of the process that rehabilitative interventions exist to support as much
(or more than) on evaluations of those interventions. To use an educational rather than
a medical analogy, developing an approach to rehabilitation focused on understanding
and supporting desistance is like developing an approach to teaching focused on
understanding and supporting learning. By contrast, an approach focused only on
evaluation evidence for different rehabilitative strategies is like an approach to teaching
based only on studying which teaching methods work best. More particularly, the RNR
analogue here would be an empirically validated approach to teaching based on
understanding and targeting the correlates of learning problems, not of successful
learning. The GLM, by contrast and in line with desistance-based perspectives, does
have its roots in a theory of human flourishing.

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As the analogy implies, a desistance perspective construes and influences

intervention in a way which is subtly different from (but not incompatible with) most
forms of rehabilitation theory. A good teacher, after all, needs to understand both how
children develop and learn, and which teaching strategies work best (including to
address learning problems). But where theory building starts out with a ‘remedial’
intervention in mind, it will almost inevitably tend to put intervention itself at the heart
of the process of change, arguably misconstruing the remedy simply as its own
‘product’. By way of contrast, desistance-based perspectives stress that the process of
change exists before, behind and beyond the intervention (McNeill, 2006, 2009); most
people stop offending sometime with or without interventions, and sometimes even in
spite of them– the practical challenge is to help them do so more swiftly and certainly.
Rehabilitative interventions then, in desistance-based perspectives, are cast in an
important but supporting role in the wider enterprise of desistance; a process that
belongs to the desister. In other words, rehabilitative interventions do not cause change
but they may support it. So, how we think about and construct intervention needs to be
‘embedded’ within an understanding of desistance (McNeill, 2006), just as thinking
about teaching needs to be embedded in an understanding of learning and human
development.

The analogy however, also exposes important limitations of desistance

perspectives. Such perspectives will help rehabilitation theory developers and
practitioners to better understand the process they are trying to support, and what
rehabilitation ought to be trying to do, but they do not and indeed cannot tell
developers or practitioners exactly what to do. Desistance perspectives do not and
cannot in and of themselves offer empirically validated rehabilitation models nor even
empirically testable ones – but they can and should inform the better development of
such models. In such development work, the fourth quadrant in Stokes’ (1997) diagram
(left blank in his model but marked with a question mark above) may also come into
play. Other important forms of knowledge and expertise are routinely neglected in the
business of rehabilitation; forms of knowledge and expertise that come from the life
experiences of service users and the professional experience of practitioners. These
much more local and personal forms of knowledge (McNeill, 2000) may not be a reliable
basis for generalisation and grand theory-building, but they are nonetheless critical to
the ‘co-production’ of credible, viable and productive plans and services for supporting
desistance at the personal and local level (Weaver, 2011).

More recently, it has been argued that even desistance itself is not the ultimate
concern (McNeill and Weaver, 2010) – it is, after all, still defined by (the absence of)
offending. But people do not simply desist; they desist into something. Desistance is
perhaps best understood as part of the individual’s ongoing journey towards successful
integration within the community (Uggen et al., 2006). Rehabilitation, therefore, is not
just about sorting out the individual’s readiness for or fitness for reintegration; it is as
much about rebuilding the social relationships without which reintegration is

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impossible. Any would-be supporter of rehabilitation has to do more than try to sort out
‘offenders’; s/he needs to mediate relationships between people trying to change and
the communities in which change is impeded or impelled; s/he also has to mediate the
role and limits of the state itself in the process.

In sum, my argument is that, viewed form the perspective of desistance theory

and research, individual level psychological theories, analysis and prescriptions are best
seen as a necessary but insufficient part of developing an integrated theory of
rehabilitation. Such a theory also needs to draw on criminology’s developing
understandings of how to assist desistance from crime, which in turn draws on both
psychological and sociological research, as well as on the knowledge and insights of ex-
offenders and practitioners.

Conclusion: Four forms of rehabilitation

‘To the extent that felons belong to a distinct class or status group, the problems
of desistance from crime can be interpreted as problems of mobility – moving
felons from a stigmatized status as outsiders to full democratic participation as
stakeholders’ (Uggen et al., 2006, p283).

Rehabilitation is a social project as well as a personal one. Whether we cast it in

deontological terms as being concerned with the requalification of citizens, or in
utilitarian and correctional terms as being concerned with their re-education or re-
socialization, it raises profound political questions about the nature of (good)
citizenship, about the nature of society, about the relationship between citizenship,
society and the state, and about the proper limits of legitimate state power.

Though these political questions and concerns are ultimately beyond the scope
of this paper and may seem somewhat abstract, they are in fact cheek by jowl with the
practical challenges of making rehabilitation work. At least some of rehabilitation’s
practical problems (and its conceptual weaknesses) come from the failure of some of its
proponents and practitioners to engage adequately with these moral and political
questions. Such engagement requires ‘psychological rehabilitation’ (which is principally
concerned with promoting positive individual-level change in the offender) to articulate
its relationships with at least three other forms of rehabilitation4.

The first of these concerns the practical expression of Beccaria’s concern with
the requalification of citizens; this is the problem of ‘legal or judicial rehabilitation’ –
when, how and to what extent a criminal record and the stigma that it represents can
ever be set aside, sealed or surpassed. Maruna’s (2011b) has recently argued cogently

4 This section of the paper draws on part of a conference paper co-authored with Shadd Maruna (McNeill

and Maruna, 2010). I am grateful to Shadd for permission to use some of that material here.

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that efforts to sponsor rehabilitation and reform must address the collateral
consequences of conviction – mostly notably its stigmatising and exclusionary effects --
or be doomed to fail. No amount of supporting offenders to change themselves can be
sufficient to the tasks and challenges of rehabilitation and desistance, if legal and
practical barriers to reintegration are left in place.

But these barriers are not just legal – they are moral and social too. A solely
psychological conception of rehabilitation is inadequate to the moral and social offence
that crime represents. In simple terms, doing something for or to the offender, even
something that aims at somehow changing them as to reduce future victimisation, fails
to engage with other key aspects of dispensing justice. Perhaps most importantly in
moral terms, rehabilitation offers no moral redress per se; it operates only on the
individual ‘offender’, not on the conflict itself and not on the victim or the community
(Zedner, 1994). Critically, reparation – and reparative work in particular -- seems
capable of fulfilling this function in ways in which rehabilitation cannot, perhaps
principally because reparation seems better able to convey (not least visibly) that
redress is being actively provided. Rehabilitation, by contrast, is typically a private and
secretive business, incapable of responding to the late-modern re-emergence of
appetites and demands for more expressive forms of justice (Freiberg, 2001; Pratt et al,
2005).

Reparation perhaps speaks to the insistence that moral demands have to be

satisfied, and moral communication secured, before moral rehabilitation can be
recognised (see also Duff, 2001). In simple terms, an offender has to pay back before
s/he can trade up to a restored social position as a citizen of good character (McNeill
and Maruna, 2010), or as Bazemore (1998) has argued, redemption needs to be earned.
This is not necessarily bad news for rehabilitation; as the Scottish Prison Commission
(2008, para 33) noted, ‘one of the best ways for offenders to pay back is by turning their
lives around’. But it does mean that rehabilitation theories and practices need to engage
much more explicitly with questions of justice and reparation.

Ultimately, even where psychological issues are tackled, legal requalification is

confirmed and moral debts are settled, the question of ‘social rehabilitation’ remains. In
European jurisprudence, the concept of ‘social rehabilitation’ entails both the
restoration of the citizen’s formal social status and the availability of the personal and
social means to do so (Van Zyl Smit and Snacken, 2009). But here, I mean instead
something that is broader, deeper and more subjective; specifically, the informal social
recognition and acceptance of the reformed ex-offender. This, rather than the
advancement of the ‘science’ of personal reform, is perhaps the ultimate problem for
rehabilitation in practice; it lies at the root of the hostile correctional climate that
Polaschek bemoans in her paper and it lies behind the mistranslation, corruption and
misuse of rehabilitation theories. The eminent sociologist and social theorist Zygmunt
Bauman’s analysis of this broader social climate led him to the sobering if pessimistic

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conclusion that ‘…the question of ‘rehabilitation’ is today prominent less by its

contentiousness than by its growing irrelevance’ (Bauman, 2000: 210).

Though we may demur from Bauman’s dystopian conclusion, I have tried to

show in this paper how too narrowly psychological a conceptualisation and theorisation
of rehabilitation risks and indeed invites the irrelevance of which he speaks. Until and
unless rehabilitation can renegotiate its relationships with its moral foundations and
constraints, with the burgeoning evidence base about the desistance process it exists to
support, and with its social, political and legal contexts, it will remain vulnerable to its
co-optation and bastardisation as a mere technique for risk management and public
protection. Such a fate is itself the likely prelude to rehabilitation’s displacement by
more certain and more constraining forms of social control. Ultimately, this is why a
more fully integrated and interdisciplinary theory and practice of rehabilitation
urgently needs to be developed.

Acknowledgements

I am particularly grateful to Gwen Robinson and Shadd Maruna for their helpful and
insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Figure 1: Two Models of Desistance Processes

Giordano et al (2002) Bottoms and Shapland (2011)

1. General cognitive openness to 1. Current offending is influenced by a

change triggering event
2. Exposure to ‘hooks for change’ 2. The offender identifies a wish to try to
3. Availability of an appealing change
conventional self 3. The offender thinks differently about
4. Reassessment of attitudes to deviant himself5 and his surroundings
behaviour 4. The offender to take action towards
desistance
5. He experiences obstacles, barriers,
temptations
6. He attempts to maintain change and
finds reinforcers
7. He develops a crime-free identity

Figure 2: Pasteur’s Quadrant (adapted)

Pure basic research Use-inspired research

(Nils Bohr) (Louis Pasteur)
Relevance for
advancement
of knowledge ? Pure applied research
(Thomas Edison)

Relevance for
immediate
application

5
The Sheffield study is a study of young men’s desistance, hence the masculine pronoun.

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